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Telegraph
Wing Commander Paddy Barthropp, who died on April 16 aged 87, was one of the RAF's most ebullient and colourful characters; he fought in the Battle of Britain, escaped twice from prisoner-of-war camps and later became a test pilot and a winning jockey in Hong Kong.

Paddy Barthropp: obeyed only those rules with which he agreed

Aged 19 Barthropp joined No 602 Squadron to fly Spitfires from an airfield on the south coast. His first day of action was September 15 1940, the climax of the Battle, when he was airborne four times. In his excitement he managed to fire off all his ammunition during each engagement and readily acknowledged that he was "absolutely terrified". On September 27 he achieved his first success when he shot down a Heinkel bomber near Brighton. A few days later he shared in the destruction of a Junkers 88.

In February 1941 Barthropp joined another Spitfire squadron, No 91, at Hawkinge in Kent; its role was to send pairs of aircraft across the Channel to shadow enemy shipping, seek out transport targets and attack aircraft on the ground.

Throughout that summer he was constantly in action, and was credited with destroying two enemy fighters, probably destroying two others and damaging two more. On numerous occasions his Spitfire returned damaged by anti-aircraft fire. In August 1941, after completing 150 operations, he was awarded a DFC and sent to a fighter training unit as an instructor.

Patrick Peter Colum Barthropp (known throughout his life as Paddy) was born during a family visit to Dublin on November 9 1920. His mother died in childbirth and Barthropp was brought up and educated in Shropshire before going to Ampleforth, where he won his colours in four sports. He later admitted: "My academic career was not as brilliant."

advertisement As the son of a distinguished amateur steeplechase rider, Paddy developed a great love of riding and was tutored by the champion jockey Steve Donoghue. On leaving school he took an engineering apprenticeship at the Rover works in Coventry.

Barthropp joined the RAF on November 1 1938 on a short service commission and trained as a pilot. During some training flights he would divert from the air exercise and trail the local hunt in his Tiger Moth.

He was posted to No 613 Squadron, flying Lysanders on Army co-operation duties, and flew on operations in support of the British Expeditionary Force until the end of the evacuation from Dunkirk. In August 1940 he answered a call for volunteers to transfer to Fighter Command to help make up for the heavy losses of pilots sustained during the significant fighting of the summer of 1940.

During his time flying on operations after the Battle of Britain, Barthropp did not neglect his social activities. He managed to acquire a two-litre Lagonda in exchange for 400 gallons of 100-octane aviation fuel. His groundcrew fitted a 25-gallon tank under the car's back seat, and this, he later said, "gave me an extra supply of juice to keep me ahead of the game when I set off for pastures green".

One evening he wrote off the car in a collision with a London taxi. On another occasion he and a colleague were fined £1 for assaulting the proprietor of the Red Lion Hotel, Hounslow, after they were refused entry to a dance. When Barthropp called the magistrate a "silly old bastard", the fine was doubled.

Barthropp's time as an instructor afforded ample opportunity for low-flying, beat-ups and a hectic social life in Shropshire. Addicted as he was to fast cars and lively ladies, Barthropp saw himself as the sworn enemy of stuffed shirts and unsympathetic authority. Returning from a particularly uproarious party at Oswestry, he drove his latest car into a lake after missing a turn. This proved to be the last straw for his commanding officer, who decided that Barthropp was not setting a good example to the students, and arranged for him to be sent back to an operational squadron. On May 12 1942 he accordingly drove his newly-acquired drophead Rover to Hornchurch to join No 122 Squadron.

Five days later Barthropp was escorting six Bostons bombing a factory near St Omer when Focke Wulf 190s attacked his formation. He shot down one of the enemy, but then the controls on his Spitfire were hit and damaged and he was forced to bale out. He was soon captured, and later that evening met the pilot who had shot him down. Four weeks later Barthropp arrived at Stalag Luft III at Sagan, where he and a colleague attempted to escape by hiding in a drain covered by a manhole cover; they were soon apprehended.

Over a period of 18 months Barthropp spent 100 days in solitary confinement for a serious of misdemeanours before being transferred to a camp in Poland. Here he was involved in digging a tunnel. After six months it was ready, and 32 men escaped. Barthropp was the third to break out, and he headed for Warsaw with a companion. A few days later they were caught by the Gestapo.

On January 28 1945 the prisoners were herded from their camp and marched westwards during the intensely cold winter. They eventually reached Lubeck, where they were liberated in May. Barthropp managed to acquire a Mercedes fire engine and he and a friend drove it to Brussels via Hamburg, where they met two ladies who were happy to spend the night with them in return for a tin of corned beef.

Barthropp remained in the RAF, working in Norway locating the graves of missing airmen - he received the Order of King Haakon to add to an earlier Cross of Lorraine awarded by the French government, and was mentioned in dispatches.To his astonishment, his application in 1946 to attend the Empire Test Pilots' School was successful and, after completing the course, he tested many fighter aircraft, including the first jets, at Boscombe Down. After a period in Khartoum, responsible for hot weather trials of the Meteor jet fighter, he went to HQ Fighter Command.

He returned to operational flying in 1952, when he was appointed to command the Waterbeach fighter wing, flying Meteors. During the flypast to celebrate the Queen's Coronation he led a formation of 288 Meteors. As he left London he was forced to fly over an RAF airfield whose controller ordered him to change course to avoid overflying. Barthropp responded with a few expletives and suggested he move his airfield, because there was no way he could turn away the tightly-packed formation in time. At the end of his tour of duty at Waterbeach he was awarded an AFC.

In 1954 Barthropp left for an administrative post at the Air Headquarters in Hong Kong, an appointment for which he had little enthusiasm. Claiming to be inadequately trained, he felt able to delegate most of his responsibilities to a junior officer and a corporal. This allowed him to take up horse racing, and he became a successful jockey, winning a number of races at the Happy Valley racecourse.

After commanding RAF Honiley, the home of two Royal Auxiliary Air Force jet fighter squadrons, he was made the senior administration officer at RAF Coltishall in Norfolk.

Barthropp found administration dreary, and he accepted his release under a "golden bowler" scheme, leaving the RAF in 1957. He used the handsome gratuity and part of an inheritance to buy a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce Phantom VI. Dressed in an expensive chauffeur's outfit he started to drive the well-heeled around Britain. Over the next few years his luxury car-hire business became very successful and he soon owned a fleet of Rolls-Royces. One of his cars featured in the James Bond film Casino Royale.

Barthropp was a great raconteur and bon vivant who, according to a colleague, "obeyed only those rules he agreed with". He was a great supporter of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association and for many years fought to get ex-PoWs the back pay they were denied. He greatly enjoyed country life, particularly shooting and fishing. He wrote an amusing autobiography, Paddy (1987), the proceeds of which went to the Douglas Bader Foundation.

Paddy Barthropp married first, in 1948, Barbara Pal. The marriage was dissolved after 10 years, and he is survived by his second wife, Betty, whom he married in 1962.

Times
Wing Commander Paddy Barthropp Spitfire pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain and became a troublesome PoW after being shot down over France in 1942 Wing Commander Paddy Barthropp Image :1 of 2 Watch a documentary on The Battle of Britain

Joining the RAF on a short-service commission in 1938, Paddy Barthropp flew Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, and later took part in sorties over occupied France. It was during one of these that he was eventually shot down over northern France in the spring of 1942, and spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner.

A redoubtable character — one of the RAF’s most notably insurrectionary spirits — he spent much of his time engineering audacious escapes for himself and others, eventually ending up in Oflag XXIB in Poland. From there, along with other PoWs he was marched out in the bitter winter of 1944-45 on the long trek westwards, away from the advancing Soviet armies. After the war he was granted a permanent commission in the RAF, converted to jets and led the Waterbeach Wing of Gloster Meteors during the 1950s.

Born in Dublin in 1920, but brought to England after his mother’s death in childbirth, Patrick Peter Colum Barthropp was educated at Ampleforth and began his working life as an engineering apprentice at Rover Cars in Coventry. In 1938 he obtained a shortservice commission in the RAF.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939 he was at the School of Army Co-Operation at Old Sarum in Wiltshire. From there he was sent in October 1939 to 613 Squadron, an army co-operation unit flying obsolescent Hawker Hind and then Hector biplanes. The squadron received Lysanders in time for it to participate in co-operating with the British Expeditionary force in France in May 1940, up to the end of the Dunkirk evacuation.

During the Battle of Britain the squadron flew coastal patrols and air-sea rescue sorties. But in August, with mounting losses in pilots, Fighter Command appealed for volunteers. Barthropp immediately stepped forward and after passing through an operational training unit, in September he was posted to 602 (Spitfire) Squadron at Westhampnett near Chichester. There it was in the thick of the fighting and Barthropp was soon in action over the South Coast, gaining several shared combat victories.

When Fighter Command went on to the offensive early in 1941, Barthropp was serving with 91 Squadron with which he carried out hit-and-run attacks across the Channel. Later in the year he was appointed a flight commander with 610 squadron, with whom he scored more combat victories and was awarded the DFC.

After a period “resting” as a flying instructor he was posted to 122 Squadron which was involved in escorting daylight cross-Channel bombing raids. On one of these, on May 17, 1942, his squadron was jumped by a number of Fw 190s, one of which wrecked his controls with its cannon shells compelling him to bale out near St Omer.

He was sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, in Upper Silesia, where an immediate attempt to escape with a fellow officer did not endear him to the authorities. As a consequence he was sent to the less salubrious environs of Oflag XXIB at Schubin in Poland, a Straflager for persistent escapers. He immediately took up the challenge, organising a breakout through a 30-yard-long tunnel. Of the 32 who got out four were murdered by the Gestapo and two were thought to have drowned trying to cross the Baltic to Sweden in a stolen sailing craft.

Barthropp was to make contact with the Polish underground in Warsaw with a view to getting away to Yugoslavia through a partisan escape line. Travelling by night in the bitter cold he was on occasions given harbourage in their barns by friendly Polish peasants. But in the end exhaustion overpowered him and he was captured while asleep in a horsebox in a railway station yard.

He was returned to Oflag XXIB, where at the end of January he was with other inmates assembled for what became known as the “Long March” westwards. In temperatures of 20 degrees below zero, with little food and less water, the sufferings of the PoWs on the march were acute. It is estimated that around 10 per cent of the quarter of a million Allied PoWs who set out from camps all over the Greater Reich perished on their march towards freedom. Barthropp reached Lübeck where he was liberated in May.

Granted a permanent commission after the war, Barthropp passed through the Empire Test Pilots School, and was then given command of “A” Fighter Test Squadron and sent to Sudan to conduct trials of the Meteor in conditions of extreme heat.

In 1952 he was appointed to command the Waterbeach fighter wing of Meteors, and led a formation as part of the Coronation celebrations in June the following year. He was awarded the AFC in 1954, but admin and red tape, more frequently encountered in the peacetime RAF as he rose in rank, irked him. It was said that he “obeyed only those rules he agreed with”. In 1957 he was happy to take his “golden bowler” and return to civvy street, where for a number of years, he ran a highly successful luxury car hire business.

He was a stalwart supporter of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, especially of those members who had become PoWs, for whom he fought to get them the back pay they had not received in captivity.

His marriage in 1948 to Barbara Pal was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Betty, whom he married in 1962.

Wing Commander Paddy Barthropp, DFC, AFC, wartime fighter pilot, was born on November 9, 1920. He died on April 16, 2008, aged 87

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